Shiv,
I am on the verge of being labelled an ES, so let me take a shot at answering your question about who and what needs protecting ...
as I have noted earlier, the keepers of Hindu Thought implemented outreach techniques to make their knowledge available to the masses ... [Kumar etc will doubt this ... if Valkan were here he would drown them in Sanskrit and quote from the scriptures about why this is precisely what happened ...]
these great thinkers were likely of the view that explaining their concepts using symbols was a great idea ... in retrospect, it may not have been fool proof ... why?
well, they probably did not figure on assault of other religions ... hence, they were propbably comfortable in their role as keepers and did not fear that one day they may be conquered and subjugated ... they did not realize that they had created an organism that will take on its own life and evolve on its own without their supervision ...
so, fast forward to today ... we now have a situation where the keepers of the Thought (my grandfather was one) are nobodies in society and are reduced to having discourses which are attended by noone but themselves ... [as an aside, I doubt that even the most virile defenders of Hinduism here have ever attended a debate conducted purely in Sanskrit ... these are the dinosaurs I grew up with ...]
so, who needs to be protected? ... answer: each and every Hindu who has lost touch with the tradition of Thought (ok, Gyaan, if you will) and is now adrift with only a set of beliefs that he holds sacred ... he is vulnerable to snake oil from others ... the fact that he lost touch with Indian spiritual tradition is not his fault but an outcome of history ...
why, you may ask, does he need to be protected? ... my answer is that as a civilization we did bad unto him ... he was fed stories, not protected from invaders, and then left on his own devices even in the modern era ...
finally, how, you may ask, do we protect him? ... IMO, it is too late to put the genie back in the bottle and rewind the proliferation of gods and goddesses ... we need to educate the masses in Hindu Thought ... psecs will scream bloody murder, but it will not be Hinduism Studies ... it needs to be in the context of cultural studies that we teach our heritage, the most precious component of which is the gems of wisdom contained in our Thought ...
I agree that BJP clowns did not address it adequately at all ... all their attempts were so sloppy that they deserved derision ...
a more balanced approach would be to teach the Thought in a secular fashion ... there should be no reason not to be able to teach the rational components and apply them equally well to a variety of symbols ... muslims and christians and followers of any other religion should be able to relate the lessons to their own theology ...
I suspect that I am ahead of my times ...